


Spend Life Fighting For Your Sanity

by roachpatrol



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Past Abuse, Past Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 22:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8772325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: Dutch’s hands shake now. All the time. Even when he can sit up, it’s a struggle just to hold a tablet. A stylus is an impossibility. His parents catch him trying to draw a circle with just his fingertip in a touch-pad program and he’s not sure what he’s more ashamed of: that he’s trying to do what’s always gotten him in trouble, or that he can’t do it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> (big thanks to LaughingStones for the beta)
> 
>  
> 
> __  
> I'm trying to find my peace  
>  I was made to believe there's something wrong with me  
> And it hurts my heart  
> Lord have mercy, ain't it plain to see?  
> 

 

It was an accident, his parents tell him. Just— an accident. He was somewhere he shouldn’t have been. He fell. There was a concussion.

 

He’s had _accidents_ before. They involve fists in his guts and boots in his ribs, not three years gone in his memory and hands that tremble constantly and intermittent headaches so bad he can’t see, or stand.

 

It was a bad accident, his parents tell him. So bad they thought they’d lose him for good and they’re so, so glad he’s come back. They’re so glad to have him back. Like he was gone for those years he lost. Like there’s much of him left.

 

Dar’s gotten so big, in the time Dutch is missing. Has been missing for. He’s a young man now, fifteen, nearly the age Dutch last remembers being. He’s lost that sweet, eager, excitable edge he always had as a kid, but he hasn’t been a kid for a long time now. The Cadets are making a man out of him, sober and calm, meticulous. He makes his bed now. He walks with his shoulders back, his head high. His voice is even and measured and his eyes, when he looks down at Dutch in bed, are dark and just a little pitying.

 

He wears the kind of boots that Dutch remembers with his whole body. But what’s Dutch going to do about that? It’s a good day when he can stay on his own feet. He’s not going to be criticizing anyone’s shoes for awhile. Maybe never. And his parents are so proud of Dar. They’ve always been proud of Dar. They’ve never had a choice.

 

Dutch’s hands shake now. All the time. Even when he can sit up, it’s a struggle just to hold a tablet. A stylus is an impossibility. His parents catch him trying to draw a circle with just his fingertip in a touch-pad program and he’s not sure what he’s more ashamed of: that he’s trying to do what’s always gotten him in trouble, or that he _can’t_ do it. He lies in bed, head pounding, guts aching, tablet thrown across the room, and feels like if a scream could be a person.

 

He sleeps. He wakes. He pokes at the holes in his head. He pokes at his food. He tries to draw. Fails. Tries. Fails. Tries. Sleeps. Tries. He is comprehensively broken. It was never an accident— or if it was, _he_ was the accident.

 

At least his parents had one good kid, even if they were dumb enough to love the bad one, too. At least they got it right on the second try. There was always something wrong with Dutch— now just about _everything’s_ wrong.

 

Dar catches him working at his tablet.

 

Asks, “What are you doing?” Loud. Authoritative.

 

Dutch finds himself across the room, pressed into the corner. Arms crossed over his head, breath burning his throat, he remembers this remembers being nine twelve fourteen remembers those boots.

 

“Oh,” the Cadet says. “I— Dutch, I’m— sorry. Hey. Hey, it’s me.” He takes a step back. Picks up Dutch’s dropped tablet. Dutch is still waiting for the hit. He got caught. When you’re caught you’re hit but you can’t stop so you're always eventually caught and hit and—how much further can they break him? What’s left for them to break? But still his body is one big flinch, trying to protect itself way too late.

 

The Cadet says, “At ease, citizen,” and Dutch can breathe again. He’s okay. He’s off the hook— and anyway it’s his brother. It’s just his brother. He can see so much of their mother in him, when he looks past the uniform. He can focus on that. Dutch pushes himself back to his feet, stumbles, doesn’t flinch when Dar catches him. One foot after the other, focusing hard, feeling sick, he makes it back to bed. Dar gives him the tablet back, steadying it until it’s back on Dutch’s lap— their hands are the same size, now, though Dar’s are callused and Dutch’s are useless.  

 

“I wasn’t,” Dutch mumbles, “I’m not. I can’t…” The tablet drops back in his lap when he tries to pick it up. Tries again. Tries again. Leaves it there.

 

Dar crosses their bedroom and kneels to stick his hand under his mattress. Comes back to Dutch’s bedside holding... something, a flat white packet, thin cardboard. Dutch takes it in painstakingly cupped hands, and Dar opens the little flap at one end.

 

Color. It’s like being able to breathe again, seeing it: color. Dar has had a pack of children’s crayons under his mattress this whole time— however long— however long it’s been. Six colors. Numbers, he can remember. The names of the colors— he doesn’t— he tries— he tries. He can’t. Chokes on it. He tries again.

 

“Purple,” Dar says, pulling the little stick out for him. “Green. Blue. Yellow. Red. Black.”

 

Dutch is supposed to be nineteen. He’s supposed to be a man, now. Stand tall. Have a job. Make his family proud. Make Deluxe— make Deluxe— he’s crying over children’s things. When you’re not a child anymore, you put them away. You learn the colors and you put them away. You learn to draw and then to stop. Only he couldn’t. He couldn’t. When he got too old, Dar got them for him. He remembers this. He remembers Dar bringing his crayons home from school, saying _show me how to draw like you_ , saying _you’re better than our teacher, I think maybe you’re better than anyone_ , saying _it’s like you’re making things for real when you do it._ Saying _keep ‘em_. Saying _I’ll just pretend they got lost._

 

Then Dar got too old, and Dutch was still too young, somehow, and he— he started— he started having accidents. Everything started to go wrong. Everything was already wrong, really, everything had always been wrong, but that was when Dutch got his hands on paint and boots started meeting ribs.  

 

Dar stands up, and Dutch clutches the color to his chest, reflexively, curling his body around the little sticks where he can’t quite curl his fingers. He can’t put them back under Dar’s mattress.

 

“They’re yours,” Dar says, and puts his hand—gently, so gently— on Dutch’s shoulder.

 

Dutch sleeps curled around the colors, and when he wakes up he _makes_ himself form a fist. He has a child’s things and about the same level of motor coordination. He grips purple in one wobbly, shaking hand and drags it across his bedroom wall, a violent slash. Up. Down. Around. One color after the other, over and over, until his legs shake and his head pounds again and his breath is a hot rasp in his throat. He doesn’t lie down until the crayons are nubs, too small to hold, and one formerly white wall of his bedroom is a scream in the shape of a rainbow.

 

The wall’s all wrong, now. It’s ruined. Like him. It’s like him. He ruined the wall and it’s beautiful and he’s broken and they’ll never fix him but it’s beautiful. And they can’t take it away, either.

 

He sleeps. He wakes. His parents yell at him and he lies there and lets them.

 

“You’re going to clean this mess off,” his dad finally says.

 

“No,” he says.

 

“Leave him alone,” Dar says, from the doorway. “He’s not hurting anyone.”

 

Dutch just laughs. “Yeah,” he says bitterly. “How many accidents can I have in my room?”

 

Still: he’s got to leave his parent’s place sometime. He’s got to go out into— into Detroit— into Detroit Deluxe. Into Deluxe. He’s got to be a citizen.

 

He takes aptitude tests on his tablet. His hands still shake but he’s learning to work around that. The headaches aren’t so bad anymore. He’s awake more. He’s getting bored.

 

He does alright. He bombs history, science, and language, but that’s not new. He does pretty good on coding and great at math, which is. He unlocks independent study modules on applied physics, on mechanical engineering, on weapons innovation. His grade level’s all over the place. Missing time. A three-year concussion makes for a pretty weird education.

 

He signs up for a class and goes out of his parent’s home and into the vast pale empty spaces of Detroit Deluxe. It’s suffocating, all this empty space. All these calm, quiet people in white. It’s hard not to see everything as one blank page after another, just waiting.

 

He has no friends. He looks into people’s faces, where there’s color and life, he smiles and says hi and shakes their hands with his own clumsy one, but if he ever knew how to make friends he doesn’t anymore, and he probably never did. No one likes the kids that get into too many accidents. No one wants to see if their crazy is catching.

 

He needs new crayons. He needs _paint_. It grows in him, day by day, growing incrementally along with his strength, not a hunger but a knowledge. Desperation, a scream, he needs color and he doesn’t remember how to to get it. He paces his room. He walks the corridors of the school.

 

Color is a kid’s thing. A tool for teaching babies. It gets put away. So he has to get to where it was put.

 

He’s caught by school Security down on the first year’s level, where only teachers are supposed to be. He’s no teacher. No one would ever listen to someone like him, his shaking hands, the guilty hunch of his shoulders.

 

“I wasn’t going to hurt anyone,” Dutch mumbles. He’s humiliated. He’s supposed to be a man. He’s supposed to be nineteen, but he feels just the same as when he was nine.

 

“Disorder hurts everyone,” says the cadet.

 

His enrollment is revoked, his access pass confiscated. He tells his parents he quit. He says it wasn’t a good fit. Lying is easy. Everyone lies. His parents say they just want what’s best for him.

 

Dar brings him paint, three fist-sized tubes in the equipment pouches of his tactical belt.

 

“Where did you get these?” Dutch asks.

 

“Sometimes stuff gets delivered to the wrong places,” Dar says, smiling an old, sweet, familiar smile. “You know how it is.”

 

He paints a city over the clumsy crayon scrawl, a mirror of the skyline out the window but darker and different. He’s got to use his fingers but that’s okay. He knows how to do this. Even with broken hands he knows how to do this. The city’s on fire, it’s neon, it’s electric, Deluxe torn away to the savage childish heart where no one ever takes away your colors because play-time’s over.

 

“I can’t believe you’re encouraging him!” his dad yells at his brother.

 

“Either it’s in here or out there,” Dar says back. “This is how he is, dad. This is always how he’s been.”

 

His mom, sad where his dad is angry: “He could get better—”

 

“He couldn’t, mom.”

 

Dutch rolls over in bed and pulls the covers up over his head. He can’t. This is it. In the dark he can still see that other city, close enough that he can touch it when he dreams.   

 

Dar brings a friend home, a girl from work. She’s short and pale and very adult, the age Dutch should be, confident and smart. A junior executive, she says. She works under Kane himself, helps coordinate Domestic Security operations.

 

“But I do a lot more with cybersecurity than actually going out and kicking any of my own butt, around here,” she laughs.

 

“Yeah, that’s what you’ve got me for,” Dar smiles, and they share some kind of private joke. She and Dar have known each other for years, since he was a junior cadet and she was an intern, and they seem have a lot of private jokes.

 

“So how are you feeling, Dutch?” she wants to know. “I heard it was a pretty bad accident.”

 

“Oh, uh— ” Dutch says, caught off guard, trying to remember who she was to him, this friend of Dar’s, if she was ever anyone. “I’m getting back on my feet, Ms Kapulsky.”

 

“Julie,” she says. “ _Please_ call me Julie.”

 

“Did we know each other?” Dutch asks, and she and Dar both wince. “I’m sorry,” he says, ashamed. “I just— I lost a lot of time. I’m sorry.”

 

The executive takes his hand: hers is small, and cold, and surprisingly strong.

 

“We can start over,” she says.

 

Dar’s brought him paper now that he’s run out of wallspace on his half of the room. After Julie leaves he draws her over and over, her face, her hands, her body in motion. He knows her like he knows his dark city, though he doesn’t know how.

 

“These are good,” Dar says, sitting on his bed with him. “These are really good. Why’d you pick these colors?”

 

Dutch shrugs. Dark gold and green, deep blue, night colors, wild colors, they just go with the banner of her hair, that feral strength in her big eyes. He draws her with a cat’s ears and claws, pretty but predatory. Deluxe likes cartoon cats just fine, but he remembers— he remembers— little killers peering around corners, big bright eyes and dead rats.

 

“Just seems right,” he says. “We were friends, weren’t we? I had a friend.”

 

“You had a lot of friends,” Dar says.

 

Dutch shrugs, because— well, where are they, then? But he dreams about them, color and motion in his dark city, close enough to touch. Brave men and brilliant women, warm hands in the night, wide smiles, the sweet low purring of all the good things he made for himself. He had friends. He knows this somehow. In his heart, his blood, the way he wakes with his arm thrown out and reaching for someone.   

 

Dar finds him packing a bag, the next morning. He doesn’t have much: a change of clothes. A couple rations of food cubes. His paints and paper.

 

“They’re waiting for you to run,” Dar says, and Dutch flinches all over. Dar stands so tall, in his Cadet uniform. He wears his gun and badge and boots and pride so well.

 

But Dutch remembers, now. He remembers the electric night of that other city. He remembers being a man, color splashed up and down his arms, through his veins, he remembers how to stand with his head high, how to wear his own pride.

 

“I have to,” Dutch says. “I can’t live here, Dar.”

 

“I know,” Dar says, and he steps forward, and hugs Dutch instead of hitting him. Dutch hugs him back, shaking all over, and Dar’s still his little brother enough that he can rest his chin on the top of his head. Maybe next time they’ll be the same height.

 

There won’t be a next time. He’ll be dead if there’s a next time.

 

Dar gives him a time to run and coordinates to run to. “I’ll be on shift, then,” he says. “I’m the lead on your case, you know, if you run, so— give us a good chase, okay? I don’t wanna look like a _total_ chump when you escape.”

 

“I don’t deserve you, little bro,” Dutch says.

 

Dar grins. “You don’t deserve a lot of things, big bro. Sit tight and I’ll see you later.”

 

He leaves a note for his parents. He paints the walls of his room flat white again, and in the wet paint he scratches  _I’m sorry,_ so the previous layer of color shows through. It’s the best he can do for them, the most honest thing he can say.

 

He rents a transit pod. He’s got the allowance to blow: he hasn’t needed to buy anything since— since— before the accident. He gets something small and fast, sleek, something executives rent to get to important meetings on time, probably. Maybe Julie uses pods like these.

 

He doesn’t remember driving one before, but it’s easy. His head still hurts and his hands still shake but something in him sings at how easy it is, still, to swing the pod out through the air and skim it down low along the ground, like flying, like— _like—_

 

— _driving_.  He whips the sleek little pod around corners and under causeways, heart pounding from the thrill of it, racing along.

 

He’s going so fast he’s got barely a split-second warning before _something_ shoots out of nowhere— Security, and they’ve got— little skimmer things they’re riding on, _bikes_ , he doesn’t know, but he’s got six guys barreling straight towards him. He wrenches his pod’s controls hard, bracing himself against the console to keep his feet planted while wheeling the pod sharply out of the way of the disabling gunfire, then kicking it forward to maximum acceleration. He takes off for the far edges of the dome, the industrial spaces where the flooring starts to come open in channels and canyons and the buildings go from sleek tall towers to all sorts of shapes, low and irregular.

 

“Warning,” says a calm automated voice from the dashboard, almost scaring him out of his skin. “You are approaching restricted radius.”

 

“Executive Override!” he snaps. That’s a thing, isn’t it?

 

“What authorization?”

 

He should know this. He should know this. He thinks of Julie— sharp-eyed dangerous executive Julie, he _knows_ her, he _knows—_

 

“Cat’s paw,” he says. “Executive Override: cat’s paw.”

 

“Accepted,” the pod controls acknowledge.

 

The riders are hard on his tail and he’s catching a lot of fire, now. It shakes the pod’s frame, peeling away layers of responsiveness and control. He jinks down the first drop-off he can get to, jinks left and right along a recessed causeway, shaking off one of the riders, then skims as low as he can over a cargo-size mag-rail. His pod squeals static and _bounces_ underneath him as it hits the industrial-strength tracks, a sickening lurch that sends his heart into his throat, but the riders following him too close are actually thrown off their bikes as the things buck and fry in the crossfire of antigrav propulsion and electromagnetic repulsion. He counts at least two of them eating pavement and whoops with exhilaration.

 

 _This_ is living, _this_ is life, speed and freedom, power under his hands, under his heels, fire and _fight_. He knows this, his bones know it, his blood knows it.

 

He knows— a yellow vehicle roaring out from an underpass, pacing him somehow on four wheels. He knows this car, gold and black, he _knows_ it it’s—

 

 _Julie_ , driver’s window going down and she’s grinning at him, fearless, dangerous. He can’t hear her through the pod walls and across the distance but she gestures with one arm, _come on_ , _this way, get in front_ , and he does. He knows the coordinates Dar gave him with his whole heart, and they’re pointing him home.

 

Behind him, covering for him, the back of Julie’s golden car opens up and a dozen awesomely gigantic guns unfold, laying down a wall of cover fire that forces their pursuit back too far to return any shots of their own. Another guy bites the ground.

 

Dutch twists and turns through the increasingly rough, complex maze of industrial facilities, heart in his throat, until the walls and warehouses rise all around them and then in front.

 

“It’s a dead end!” Dutch shouts, leaning out of his pod. “It’s— what do we do?”

 

“It’s _supposed_ to be a dead end,” Julie grins, getting out of her car. “But you’ve got friends.”

 

A girl swings out from behind a near-seamless white access panel, almost Julie’s size but dark-skinned where she’s pale, gorgeous and curvy and muscled where Julie’s lanky and when Dutch looks at Julie he thinks _comrade_ and when he looks at this girl and her bright eyes and big grin his stomach turns inside out and his heart detonates.

 

They’re kissing before he’s fully conscious of climbing down from his pod and his arms fit around her like that’s what they were made for.

 

Julie coughs, not very subtly.

 

“Tennie,” she says. “The dead end situation?”

 

“Oh, right, yeah,” the girl— _Tennie, his, he knows her_ — laughs, and snaps her fingers, the sound a little muffled from her work gloves. She draws a really big wrench from her tool belt and reluctantly pulls herself free from Dutch, who immediately follows her the three steps it takes to get to the wall. He can hear Security closing in on them and he is entirely prepared to stand between her and their guns and boots and _whatever_ until he dies, and the fondly exasperated look she gives him says she knows that and thinks it’s extremely dumb, but also kind of sweet. So that’s cool. He can’t stop grinning.

 

Julie ducks back into Nine Lives and gets a helmet on, dark faceplate and metal cat ears and a ring of nine slit-pupiled green eyes painted on like jewels in a crown. Dutch knows who painted them: he did, he did that. He did it for her.

 

She draws an electric hard-light boomerang and slings it at the first rider who gets close enough. The poor guy goes flying off his bike and the bike itself crashes into a wall. Julie catches her weapon smoothly out of the air as it wings back to her, then spins gracefully on one heel and sends it singing back out to take down another bike. The third guy’s close, too close—Julie ducks her helmet down and just _charges_ the guy, slamming him bodily off the bike and rolling over and over on the ground with him, her thin pale arms grappling against— against— _that’s Dar,_ Dutch realizes all at once, _she’s fighting Dar—_

 

One of the guys isn’t moving but the other makes it to his feet and charges Tennie, baton out. Dutch thinks _boots_ , thinks _fists_ , and lashes out. His hands work well enough for this: he grabs the guy by his uniform jacket and throws him to the ground. He buries his foot in the other guy’s guts. He knows how to do this. He remembers how to _fight_.

 

“You got him,” Tennie says, pulling on the back of his shirt. “Dutch. Hey. It’s okay, you got him. Ease up.”

 

Red splashed all over the white floor plating. Darkness at his back: the smell of motor oil and smoke and paint and freedom. In front of him Julie is rising up from the crumpled pile of Dutch’s brother— heading for her car, and he can see— it’s not so far that he can’t see— Dar looks at him across the distance, and _winks_. One of his hands is limp and broken. The other gives a little thumbs-up.  

 

Dutch smiles back, turns around. Where there had been a flat dead end is now an open door, Tennie’s opened it up onto somewhere huge. More cars are waiting, in the darkness, gleaming green and red and purple at the very edge of Deluxe’s too-bright light. Dutch knows those cars, this darkness.

  
He goes home.

**Author's Note:**

>  __  
> That this is a cold war  
>  Do you know what you're fighting for?  
> This is a cold war  
> You better know what you're fighting for...  
> —Janelle Monae, _Cold War_


End file.
